The Pylos Regional Archaeological Project: Part II: Landscape Evolution and Site Preservation

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The American School of Classical Studies at Athens is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. H[rUMAN HABITATION PATTERNS are constrained by natural resources andprocesses. Any regional archaeological project must therefore first determine the primary resources provided by the natural setting, including the availability of fresh water, arable land, mineral deposits, building stones, and natural harbors, and, second, investigate the geological processes that may have distorted the original archaeological record, including erosion, deposition, tectonic movement, and coastal progradation and regression. Only when the quality and quantity of these factors are known will archaeological field projects be able to establish site size, function, and duration and reconstruct and interpret the historic interrelation between human habitation and landscape evolution.When the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project (PRAP) was conceived to investigate the history of settlement and land use in western Messenia (Peloponnesos, Greece), 1 it was decided that physical sciences would comprise a major component of the study. This article represents the preliminary report of the principal natural scientists who participated in the fieldwork for PRAP between 1991 and 1995.2 By employing an interdisciplinary team consisting of a geoarchaeologist (Eberhard Zangger), a soil scientist (Michael Timpson), a botanist and palynologist (Sergei Yazvenko), a geophysicist (Falko Kuhnke), and a hydroengineer (Jost Knauss), it was possible to reconstruct the environmental history of the landscape centered on the Palace of Nestor.3 Among the main results of this study are a continuous vegetation history for the past 7,000 years, the discovery of the earliest artificial port in Europe, and the discovery of a magnetic anomaly indicating a massive artificial structure northwest of the Palace of Nestor. CHARACTERISTICS OF MESSENIAWestern Messenia lies hidden in a far corner of the Greek mainland and is difficult to reach from the eastern Peloponnesos by land because three mountain ridges obstruct 1 See Davis et al. 1993Davis et al. , 1994aDavis et al. , 1994bDavis et al. , 1995Davis et al. , and 1997 for a description of PRAP and for preliminary archaeological results. The full illustrated texts of preliminary reports for the 1993-1995 seasons are available on the WorldWideWeb at http://classics.lsa.umich.edu/PRAP.html, as is a complete gazetteer of all archaeological sites investigated by PRAP and a catalogue of representative artifacts from them. The physical scientific research was funded through PRAP by the Institute...

The Hidden Landscape of Prehistoric Greece

“…Very similar conclusions could be drawn from the reports of one of the latest intensive surveys from mainland Greece, the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project (Davis et al 1997;Zangger et al 1997;Davis 1998;cf. Shelmerdine 1997), which is appropriately set in the homeland of the original extensive Messenia survey of 30 years ago.…”

“…In the former district, the geomorphology showed unmistakable signs of serious erosion of the local marls (Zangger et al 1997), which must have substantially affected the recovery of prehistoric sites and material. Boeotia, however, exemplifies a landscape that, though partly composed of similar marls, has remained (for Greece) unusually stable-a fact for which we have once again the authority of Eberhard Zangger (pers.…”

The stratigraphic implications of long‐term terrace agriculture in dynamic landscapes: Polycyclic terracing from Kythera Island, Greece

“…Geoarchaeological projects conducted in Greece independently or in conjunction with surface survey projects have routinely documented the impact on site visibility of alluvial sedimentation in river valleys (e.g., Bintliff, 1977;Cherry et al, 1988;Zangger et al, 1997;Krahtopoulou, 2003) and have sometimes explored the effects on site preservation in slope environments (e.g., Zangger, 1992;Besios & Krahtopoulou, 2003;Krahtopoulou, 2003). The role of terracing in stabilizing slopes and artifact mobility in terraced landscapes has also been discussed (e.g., James, Mee, & Taylor, 1994;French & Whitelaw, 1999), but not the role of anthropogenic landscape modification on site integrity and visibility (Frederick & Krahtopoulou, 2000).…”

European Regional Studies: A Coming of Age?

“…It may be that soil erosion contributed to an Early Bronze Age economic "collapse" and subsequent contraction of settlement, at the same time eroding earlier sites or obscuring them under mantles of displaced earth. Geomorphological approaches to the regional archaeological record are greatly enhanced when combined with paleo-environmental reconstruction based on pollen data (e.g., Zangger et al, 1997a). Palynologists can often determine exactly when episodes of deforestation took place, leading to subsequent problems with soil erosion (e.g., Bottema, 1994; various articles in Leveau et al, 1999).…”

“…Because of the strong influence of geomorphology on the recovery of ancient settlement patterns, most regional projects in Europe now employ a geoarchaeologist (or team of geoarchaeologists) who can help explain the effects of landscape change and soil erosion in advance of and during survey (e.g., Zangger et al, 1997a). As a result, we can often say with a high degree of certainty when sites are missing from a landscape because they never existed or because they were buried at some point.…”